This invention relates generally to the area of system interconnect technology. Multi-lane communications provide one method of providing high speed communications between integrated circuit (“IC”) devices. Some applications require significant distance between transmit and receive systems. For example, a cell phone tower requires communications between tower and base systems. In such applications, the problem of skew from one lane to another can become particularly significant. Multi-lane communication techniques typically handle skew by delaying data arriving on a faster lane until the slower lane arrives. However, with such techniques it is not necessarily known in advance which lane will be slowest for a particular implementation. Therefore, at least some delay needs to be provided on the receive end for all lanes and total latency is unknown. At the same time, however, some communication protocols, such as CPRI and OBSAI require measurable latency. Presently these protocols are single lane protocols. However, as the need for multi-lane communications at higher data rates increases, it may be desirable to adapt protocols for single lane communications to multi-lane communications. Therefore, there is a need for a multi-lane technique that effectively handles deskew while providing measurable latency.